And he took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun,.... Consecrated to it; these were not images of horses, as some have thought, but real living ones; and the kings that gave them for the service of the sun, and for sacrifice to it, very probably were Manasseh and Amon: that horses were sacred to the sun with many Heathen nations, as the Massagetae, a people in Scythia, and the Persians, and Babylonians, and Ethiopians, is affirmed by various writers : and from them the Jews received this notion.
According to the Jewish commentators, these were horses provided for the worshippers of the sun to ride upon, and meet the sun in the morning at its rising, and pay their homage to it; but certain it is that the Heathen nations before mentioned slew the horses, and sacrificed them as burnt offerings to the sun, as is asserted by Herodotus , Xenophon , Strabo , Pausanias , Philostratus , and other writers ; and so the Indians of India sacrificed them to Apollo, the same with the sun; these being the swiftest of creatures, they offered them to the swiftest of their gods, as Herodotus and Heliodorus observe, in the places before referred to.
The stables in which these horses were kept wereat the entering of the house of the Lord, by the chamber of Nathanmelech the chamberlain, which was in the suburbs; so that they reached from the temple to the suburbs of Jerusalem, to that part of them where this officer had a chamber, or lodgings, being in some place of power and authority there; though, according to L'Empereur , it is the same with Parbar, 1Ch 26:18 and should not be rendered "suburbs", it being between the compass or wall of the temple, and the court:and burnt the chariots of the sun with fire; these were either chariots, in which the king and his nobles rode, when they went to meet and worship the rising sun; or rather such as were sacred to the sun, as well as the horses, or Josiah would not have burnt them; they seem to be such in which the images of the sun were carried.
Herodotus makes mention as of sacred horses, so of a sacred chariot. Xenophon speaks of the chariot of the sun as being of a white colour, and drawn in procession at the worship of the sun; as does also Pausanias of a chariot, in which were the sun, Jupiter, and Juno, and near them other deities; which notion of sacred chariots the Heathens might take from the chariot of the cherubim Jehovah sat and rode in, 1Ch 28:18.
Justin e Trogo, l. 1. c. 10. Curt. Hist. l. 3. c. 3. Ovid. Fast. l. 1. Alex. ab Alex. Genial. Dier. l. 6. c. 26. Heliodor. Ethiop. l. 10. c. 6. 28. Clio, sive, l. 1. c. 216. Cyropaed. l. 8. c. 23, 24.
Geograph. l. 11. p. 353. Laconica, sive, l. 3. p. 201. Vit. Apollon. l. 1. c. 20. Vid. Lactant. de fals. Relig. l. 1. c. 21. Laon. Chalcondyl. de Rebus Turc. l. 3. p. 108. Not. in Misn. Middot, c. 2.
sect. 3. No. 3. So Boehart. Hierozoic. par. 1. l. 2. c. 10. col. 177. Polymnia, sive, l. 7. c. 55. Ut supra, (Cyropaed. l. 8.) c. 23. Eliac. 1. sive, l. 5.